Files & Biometric Identifiers on More Than a Billion
Passengers to be Computerised and Shared Globally by 2015

Civil rights groups warn of grave dangers in international
biometric passport system

29th March 2004, Embargo: 22.00 hrs GMT, 29th March 2004

A wide range of privacy, human rights & civil liberties
organisations throughout the world have signed an open letter
expressing grave concerns over a global biometric identity system
being established on behalf of governments by the International
Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

The letter, spearheaded by Privacy International and the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) raises concerns about little-known
plans to imminently create international standards that will
require the use of biometrics and RFID (radio frequency) technology
in all future passports. The measures, being decided this week
at a meeting of the ICAO in Cairo, will result in a distributed
international identification database on all passport holders.

The open letter has been signed by, among others, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, Statewatch, the UK based Foundation for
Information Policy Research, the Association for Progressive
Communications and the US based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

The ICAO has agreed that the initial international biometric
standard for passports will be facial mapping. Adequate memory
space in newly issued passports will be reserved for additional
biometrics such as fingerprinting at the discretion of every
government. The EU is already calling for fingerprints to be
included, along with an associated European register of all biometrics.
National authorities will store and share these vast data reserves.

The measures, supported by the US and the EU, will ultimately
create an electronic ID system on hundreds of millions of travellers.
Despite serious implications for privacy and personal security,
the process is occurring without public engagement or debate.
Rather than allowing this important issue to be decided by parliaments,
governments have delegated the setting of standards to the ICAO,
a UN-level organization that is responsible for the standardization
of travel documents, passenger data systems and air travel requirements.

The legislative drivers for the ICAO system are already in
pace. The USA-PATRIOT Act, passed by the U.S. Congress after
the events of September 2001 included the requirement that the
President certify a biometric technology standard for use in
identifying aliens seeking admission into the U.S., within two
years. The schedule for its implementation was accelerated by
another piece of legislation, the little known Enhanced Border
Security and Visa Entry Reform Act 2002.

Part of this second law included seeking international co-operation
with this standard. The incentive to international co-operation
was made clear:

"By October 26, 2004, in order for a country to remain
eligible for participation in the visa waiver program its government
must certify that it has a program to issue to its nationals
machine-readable passports that are tamper-resistant and which
incorporate biometric and authentication identifiers that satisfy
the standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization
(ICAO)."

These laws gave momentum to the standards that were being
considered at the ICAO by requiring visa waiver countries (which
include many EU countries, Australia, Brunei, Iceland, Japan,
Monaco, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, and Slovenia) to implement
biometrics into their Machine-Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs),
i.e. passports.

Based on projections from current passport and travel statistics,
biometric details of more than a billion people will be electronically
stored by 2015. Some of the countries sampled for this estimate
are:

United States 90 million
United Kingdom 54 million
Japan 64
million
Canada 24
million
Australia 13
million
Russian Federation 50 million
reland 4
million
Taiwan 17
million
China 60
million

The Privacy International open letter warns:

"We are increasingly concerned that the biometric
travel document initiative is part and parcel of a larger surveillance
infrastructure monitoring the movement of individuals globally
that includes Passenger-Name Record transfers, API systems and
the creation of an intergovernmental network of interoperable
electronic data systems to facilitate access to each country's
law enforcement and intelligence information."

Privacy International has warned of "unprecedented"
security threats that could arise from the plan because of potential
access by terrorists and organised crime. Furthermore, the biometric
standard being adopted is "fundamentally flawed" and
will result in a substantial number of passengers being falsely
identified as potential terrorists or wrongly accused of holding
fraudulent passports.

Dr Gus Hosein, Senior Fellow with Privacy International, warned:
"This is a potentially perilous plan. The ICAO must go
back to the drawing board or hold itself responsible for creating
the first truly global biometric database".

"Governments may claim that they are under an international
obligation to create national databases of fingerprints and face
scans but we will soon see nations with appalling human rights
records generating massive databases, and then requiring our
own fingerprints and face-scans as we travel."

He continued: "In January 2004 when the U.S. began
fingerprinting and face-scanning foreign visitors and storing
this data for over fifty years under the US-VISIT program, many
countries responded with alarm. With the biometric passport,
however, every country may have its own surveillance system,
accumulating fingerprints and face-scans and keeping them for
as long as they wish with no regard to privacy or civil liberties."

- Privacy International (PI) www.privacyinternational.org
is a human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance
by governments and corporations. PI is based in London, and has
an office in Washington, D.C. Together with members in 40 countries,
PI has conducted campaigns throughout the world on issues ranging
from wiretapping and national security activities, to ID cards,
video surveillance, data matching, police information systems,
and medical privacy, and works with a wide range of parliamentary
and inter-governmental organisations such as the European Parliament,
the House of Lords and UNESCO.Statewatch News
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